Thursday, 15 November 2012

What preproduction is needed for Website Design and are the elements important?


“You should never proceed with a business venture before doing extensive planning, and a website is no different. If you wish to publish a successful website you need to lay the groundwork before you even code your first page. With the right planning and foresight you will in a much better position to power your site to the top once it is built.”


Just like a business preproduction is needed to help make the website successful and you can’t just go into making a website straight away otherwise you won’t have a good idea on what you want the website to look like and what you want on it, and with planning and preproduction it can make designing the website a whole lot easier compared to if you didn’t plan as you have information ready and an idea on the design. Preproduction for a website design is extremely important for making a website and also working with clients, one thing which could be important for preproduction on a website design is getting feedback on your preproduction work for the design of the website so you could do a questionnaire, getting this feedback from questionnaires or surveys helps change the sites design

Preproduction is needed for a website so you can get to understand certain things like, how the website will be presented, what your website is going to be about, what information the website is going to have etc, and all of this can be found and planned in different ways, and they are all needed to make sure that the website makes sense, that the design you have is suitable to what the website is about and also to make sure that it is suitable for your TA (Target Audience)


Preproduction can be extremely important for your website, because preproduction will be the difference between a good website design and a bad one, and without preproduction you won’t have a general idea on what the website will look like, whether or not it will have certain pictures or video on the website. this is because if you go straight into the design of the website you could end up making mistakes and changing a lot of it before you get your final website and you may also not have all the information that you need for the site or have a straight idea on what you want it to look like which is another reason why you could change a lot on the website before you get your final website finished, whereas if you do preproduction for a website then you will be able to make it suit your target audience, and you will have the design/information ready for when you make the site, and although it takes time it’s more important as you are able to make sure that everything you have ready is good for the website and will also help decide how your website will look.


(Site pre-production):

Before making the website preproduction is needed to make sure you have a website planned, one example of preproduction is a site map:

A site map is used to show all the pages on your website and how they are like each other, this can help with the focus on the website or what it will be based on. In the site map you can have all of the pages and what page they have to come from to get to that specific page, so this could be important as it helps make the design of the website as you can see where the pages will go or what other pages can lead on from that one. Site maps are good preproduction to help with the website design as you can see what you want to have on each page of the site and it also shows on which page you want certain parts on

Here is an example of what a site map can look like:



 


Another way of preproduction for a website is designing the website, this can be done by sketching each page or the layout for the pages and this can be done in different ways e.g. on paper using a pen, using software on a computer such as Photoshop, making a design for your website is important so you can plan where everything will go and where each bit of information, pictures, or just any text will be put on each page, making this design can also help you decide the style of the website. A way you can think about the design of your site or how you would like it to look is by doing research like finding other websites on the internet that relate to your style for a website/ what your website will be based on and this is the same as making the design of the website for importance, so looking at other peoples websites can help you decide what your website can look like and you can just get general ideas on what you want to have on your website/what you want it to look like, you could also make a draft website just


Info on web design:


Something else that could come under planning the design of the website is also if you want any media on the site such as pictures, logos or audio this is important because if you are working with a client then you will need to know and understand what they would like on the site, this helps to make sure the information you have for the website relates to the client, however adding in these images, audio, video etc. It will also affect the design so when planning what media to have on the site it could change what the design of the website will look like, this is important for preproduction because you can sort out all the media you want on the site and design around it whereas if you didn’t plan out before it could be difficult to change the design whilst you are adding it all in, this also links in with how it is easier to have it all planned out before so it helps make it easier when it comes to designing the final website.



The 8 steps of web design:


These steps are quoted from the website:
1.       “Figure out what the focus of the website will be.
2.       What specific features do you want in the website?
3.       Create a list of sections for your website and give them a hierarchy of importance.
4.       Write out your content and finalize it.
5.       Find a style / look that meets your website’s and your industry’s requirements.
6.       Build the website.
7.       Evaluate the website and make the required changes / updates.
8.       Go live – register a domain, find a host, upload the website.”

As you can see from these steps that preproduction is important as only at step 6 do you start to actually build the website, until that point the other work is based on what the site will be about, what will be on the website such as information and the content and what the style will be for the website.

About building/designing a website:

Something else that could be important for the preproduction of the website is the interface and how people can get around the website, the reason this is important is just so you can make sure that the site is easy to get around and so it’s easy to use, this could also relate to your target audience and how the interface will look because if the target audience is for adults then you aren’t going to make the interface almost childlike and this will affect your design of the website because of the Target audience and how this will affect how the UI(user interface) looks and works.

Preproduction on a website and how important it is also relates to the group project that we have just done in college, so for our website we decided to do about catering, we did a bit on preproduction for the site before we designed the website where we looked at other websites for inspiration on how our website should look, and maybe what kind of information we should put on our website, this was important because we actually found some good designs and were able to figure out how to incorporate some of those ideas/ designs into our final website, we also looked at finding pictures for the website so that on each page on the site there would be pictures and also some background images to suit catering so pictures of food, so us doing our project helped us see that without preproduction designing a website from scratch would be extremely difficult, and without it you would have difficulty coming up with ideas, so not only is preproduction for a website design good to help decide what will be on the website, but it can also be very useful to decide how a website can look and what kind of design it will have, and also how it will help design the UI for the site.



Overall there are loads of different ways for preproduction to be done for a website and they are also all important for different reasons but they all help to make up a good website design, and without website preproduction it would be difficult to make a good website that suits your TA and what your website is meant to be focused on, also because without preproduction work on designing the website you may become stuck on what to do, how to design the site and so on.

-Daniel Sherman






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